Upcoming Article on generating Non-Standard charts (such as Renko), using MT5’s “Custom Symbols” (similar to “Offline Charts” in MT4). - page 2

 

Well by all means go for it.

Personally i see Renko as 'just' being a visualization technique and not really a strategy.

More like a noise suppressor, like in the old citizen band transceivers there was a so called 'squelch'  knob that you could turn to suppress the white noise, when nobody was talking.

I mean a 100 pips or 10x10 bricks up the levels are just the same so it's meaningless to try and turn it into a EA and so i never fully understand why people try to do that.

The same goes for Heiken  Ashi and several others that only make the chart look better so to speak.

I once wrote a multi symbol Renko that would strip the vertical component and only display horizontal bricks, but in a way that all available instruments were on the same chart.

This made it possible to also see the fastest moving instruments in the blink of an eye, something you wont see with all these single instrument indicators...


 
Marco vd Heijden:

Well by all means go for it.

Personally i see Renko as 'just' being a visualization technique and not really a strategy.

More like a noise suppressor, like in the old citizen band transceivers there was a so called 'squelch'  knob that you could turn to suppress the white noise, when nobody was talking.

I mean a 100 pips or 10x10 bricks up the levels are just the same so it's meaningless to try and turn it into a EA and so i never fully understand why people try to do that.

The same goes for Heiken  Ashi and several others that only make the chart look better so to speak.

I once wrote a multi symbol Renko that would strip the vertical component and only display horizontal bricks, but in a way that all available instruments were on the same chart.

This made it possible to also see the fastest moving instruments in the blink of an eye, something you wont see with all these single instrument indicators...

Renko is a charting style! No one said it was a strategy! Also, it does not have to be fixed sized Renko - it can also be adaptive/dynamic, changing size based on ATR for example. Heikin-Ashi too is a charting style (its just a moving average).

Alternatively, if I see that the Renko subject is too diverse due to there being too many variants with each camp defending their own favourite, I may instead just use the 3-Line Break as the example non-custom chart. At least for this one, there will be no discussion about M1 verses Tick data, because it does not depend on Tick data.

 

I didn't mean you said it was a strategy, but you'd be amazed at the number of people that want to, or think that it can be turned into a holy grail robot.

There are a lot of good articles already, so make sure that you wont be re-inventing the wheel.

And i also do not understand what good are custom symbols, you can train a robot on a non existent or artificial instrument but i fail to see the extra value that creates.

 
Marco vd Heijden: I didn't mean you said it was a strategy, but you'd be amazed at the number of people that want to, or think that it can be turned into a holy grail robot.

There are a lot of good articles already, so make sure that you wont be re-inventing the wheel.

And i also do not understand what good are custom symbols, you can train a robot on a non existent or artificial instrument but i fail to see the extra value that creates.

It will mostly be for Manual trading off a non-standard chart where a trader wants to apply their own Indicators (built-in or custom). With the current implementations, that just display the Renko as an Indictor, it is not so easily accomplished as it was with the old way of "Offline Charts" on MetaTrader 4. However, with "Custom Symbols", that is now possible, making the transition to MetaTrader 5 easier. In fact, that is what sparked this whole project in the first place, for the user I am coding this for:

How to transfer historical data from mt5 to mt4
How to transfer historical data from mt5 to mt4
  • 2017.12.02
  • www.mql5.com
I'm working with a broker that doesn't support mt4 but i want to work with mt4, and it only has mt5...
 

Okay well that's a bit of a late solution then.

I have grown common to directly push the data into Google's chart API.

Because i felt that i had reached the limit of what could be done with MT.

If your interested, it was one of the better decisions i made.

But it's a whole new level of (interactive) visualization and when i showed it to other people i immediately realized that they did not understand what they were looking at or how to use it, because they were so well trained to stare at the 'vintage' classical Metatrader charts... 

I guess their minds are somewhat limited to process one instrument at a time, and when there are more, it creates something of an overload resulting in a mass confusion... nevertheless the underlying links between economy's can be very revealing, and proved to be of utmost importance.

At least that's what i was thinking at the time so i just use it for myself without thinking about it too much. 

 

Marco vd Heijden: Okay well that's a bit of a late solution then.

I have grown common to directly push the data into Google's chart API.

Because i felt that i had reached the limit of what could be done with MT.

If your interested, it was one of the better decisions i made.

But it's a whole new level of (interactive) visualization and when i showed it to other people i immediately realized that they did not understand what they were looking at or how to use it, because they were so well trained to stare at the 'vintage' classical Metatrader charts... 

I guess their minds are somewhat limited to process one instrument at a time, and when there are more, it creates something of an overload.

At least that's what i was thinking at the time so i just use it for myself without thinking about it too much. 

I think you are going off topic here! Please don't derail this thread. We are not discussing the merits (or demerits) of any one type of charting style or the way a trader wishes to present his data to others or himself. That is not the point!

What I am requesting is what subject sub-matter details users are interested in having discussed in the upcoming Article (with regards to the original subject matter).

You are welcome to start your own thread and/or article on how to use Google's API to add statistical analysis and data representation as an alternative (in which I would be interested in following), but that is not the focus of this topic.

 

Okay well i suggest you start writing then.

I was just pointing out to the fact that there are other solutions, that can easily outperform what you was writing about.

And do not forget that you actually asked for suggestions so do not now put any blame on me for responding, or going off topic !

 
Marco vd Heijden: Okay well i suggest you start writing then. I was just pointing out to the fact that there are other solutions, that can easily outperform what you was writing about. And do not forget that you actually asked for suggestions so do not now put any blame on me for responding, or going off topic !

I think you may feel that I personally attacked you there when there was no such intention. I am just trying to steer the thread in the correct direction, given that as the title states, it is about using "Custom Symbols" to be able to have Non-standard (not time based) Charting. It is not about Renko. I will just be using Renko (given its popularity) as the example of a non-standard chart style to explain the implementation. I can just as easily use another such as 3-Line Break or even Point-and-Figure.

The 2 main points of the article and the thread are:

  • ... using "Custom Symbols" on MT5 ...
  • ... to be able to have Non-Standard Charting ...
 

So, from what has been posted here so far, I think I will tackle this in the following way:

  1. An Article, using the 3-Line Break (instead of Renko) as the example of a non-standard chart, and ...
  2. ... due to its popularity, I will publish the Renko implementation in the CodeBase, as that will allow for further development and improvements over time because of the many variants.
 
Fernando Carreiro:

I will be providing source code, in the form of an Indicator, to generate variations of Renko charts.

Why indicator? It should be a non-trading expert IMHO. I have one for that exact purpose, but it has some issues at the moment due to some bugs in the newly introduced custom symbol functions. [Long-long] Awaiting for the build 1700, which has been finally just announced, to check out.
Reason: